Last month, all of the sudden, I was tasked with writing a script for a short play for an English Language Carnival to be held at UUM. Not just that, but I had to coach the actors, who were all students of our business school. The theme was “peace”. So I wrote a script with 10 speaking roles (2 narrators […]
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I’m clearly in red
Herein lies the collection of blog posts about my teaching English as a second language to university students.
Mini Six: The Seaside Catastrophe
And so it came to pass that I was given the opportunity to present my ideas for tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) as a language learning tool to the workplace. During the workshop, I also ran a Mini Six session for the participants. For the first time ever, I gamemastered (GM) an RPG session for colleagues, which was something I never […]
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Teaching Without Power
This semester I have to help teach another English course to a class of professionals in another learning institution. Today, during my class in which I have prepared a ton to slides to be shown on the screen, the unthinkable happened. There was a blackout. So I took the class outdoors. Luckily there was a cafe right outside the class, […]
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Theatre Was Suddenly In My Repertoire
Did I not join this university as a language translator? How did I end up teaching English Theatre Arts as a co-curricular course? It really matters not, because I am enjoying my role as an language educator here. More so because I love teaching enhancement of soft skills. So my course began this week. We began with the obligatori Negaraku […]
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Mini Six: A Day By The Sea
Mini Six: Doom Agents 01 A Day by the Sea For the third time I ran a tabletop RPG session for my class using the Mini Six system, and this time I have integrated it with the English curriculum we had. The week’s lesson theme was Natural Disaster and I also had to teach them about Descriptive Essays. The RPG became […]
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Symposium Gift Artwork
At the language symposium last week, besides the two assignments I wrote about I also had a third task: Which was to sketch some artwork to be printed and presented as gifts to the special guests of the event. The common theme for each drawing was Perlis. I drew them all in Krita separately. Photographic references, of course, were used. […]
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My First Language Symposium
Another new experience I underwent was the language symposium I attended this weekend. The language symposium was an annual collaboration between three universities, two of them in southern Thailand. I was also part of the organising committee, although my duties were by far the most unimportant and required the least time and effort compared to everyone else who did a […]
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Enhancement Workshop at Langkawi
If you had asked me 10 years ago or so, I would say my new experiences will be declining gradually the older I grew. There would be less chances for me to do new things. I am pleased to report that I was wrong. In the last year or so I have been involved in a number of things I […]
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Force and Destiny: Jungle in the Sky
I was finally able to run another role-playing game session for my students for an English Language speaking exercise, the first for this semester. Probably no other games will be run because it is already quite late in the semester for other sessions. Students will be concentrating on their finals. Although it was technically a Force and Destiny game, we […]
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Tabletop Games Expo at UniMAP
After almost two years in Perlis, there arose an opportunity to host a tabletop game exhibition here at the university. Gray, a gamer I knew and interacted with online back in Kuala Lumpur, planned a KakiTabletop Northern Tour. This tour would take his team and himself from KL to Taiping to Prai to Penang to Perlis and back down to […]
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Some Sort of Translation Workshop
Then it came to pass that I have to present a talk at the department’s inaugural Basic Translation Workshop. Public speaking is not something that comes to me easily. Despite all the training afforded to be by over 25 years of gamemastering, it still affects me negatively as I was extremely introverted growing up. I did not know whether it […]
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Mini Six: Shadows Through The Mist
I have always stated that tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) can be amazing teaching tools, not only for language purposes but to develop critical thinking skills, social skills and general knowledge. Yesterday, I finally ran a game in an English for General Purposes class to see the students could be engaged enough for them to communicate with each other and me […]
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At The End of the First Week
And now the first week of teaching is over. What do I have to report? The students are well-behaved (so far) and are very disciplined, most wearing their dark engineering jacket uniforms. They adhere to procedure quite well to, even if registering for classes seemed to be a haphazard affair. They spent little time appointing a class representative among themselves. […]
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And Then You Teach
When you were a child, you always imagined – no, been compelled to believe – that life is a series of consequent acts that scales up as you experience it. You would expect pieces of your future would fall into place like a linear jigsaw puzzle that solves itself as you grow older. For example if you started out as […]
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What? A Nasyid?
Way, way out from the left field comes a blog post about nasyid. I was assigned to sing in the department’s nasyid group for an interdepartmental nasyid competition despite not having to sing in public since 1987. Here is a screen capture of a video of our singing, which is linked below. We took a team photo after our performance. […]
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